A blog about American History, and the development of a great Nation

I used to belong to the Society for Military History. I withdrew my membership last when I was informed by the Society that it had signed on to the following resolution by the American Historical Association. Below is that resolution with my commentary:

The American Historical Association strongly condemns the executive order issued by President Donald J. Trump on January 27 purportedly “protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.” Historians look first to evidence: deaths from terrorism in the United States in the last fifteen years have come at the hands of native-born citizens and people from countries other than the seven singled out for exclusion in the order. Attention to evidence raises the question as to whether the order actually speaks to the dangers of foreign terrorism.

The resolution starts out with a sophistical piece of verbal sleight of hand. Note the use of 15 years as the relevant time scale. Why? Why not 20 years or 25 years? Because if a time scale longer than 15 years were used, 9-11 would be included, and the initial statement would be rendered false. As an attorney, and familiar with weasel worded arguments, I have nothing but contempt for this type of lie of omission.

It is more clear that the order will have a significant and detrimental impact on thousands of innocent people, whether inhabitants of refugee camps across the world who have waited months or even years for interviews scheduled in the coming month (now canceled), travelers en route to the United States with valid visas or other documentation, or other categories of residents of the United States, including many of our students and colleagues.

Actually the Administration acted swiftly to fix the Executive Order for green card holders. As for refugees, this was intended to be a temporary ban until proper vetting procedures could be put into place. Last year the Director of the FBI testified before Congress that then current vetting procedures were inadequate.

The AHA urges the policy community to learn from our nation’s history. Formulating or analyzing policy by historical analogy admittedly can be dangerous; context matters. But the past does provide warnings, especially given advantages of hindsight. What we have seen before can help us understand possible implications of the executive order. The most striking example of American refusal to admit refugees was during the 1930s, when Jews and others fled Nazi Germany. A combination of hostility toward a particular religious group combined with suspicions of disloyalty and potential subversion by supposed radicals anxious to undermine our democracy contributed to exclusionist administrative procedures that slammed shut the doors on millions of refugees. Many were subsequently systematically murdered as part of the German “final solution to the Jewish question.” Ironically, President Trump issued his executive order on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

An organization that purports to represent American historians should do a better job with history. As of 1939 the US had admitted 95,000 German Jewish refugees. This was out of a total of 282,000 German Jewish refugees, and 117,000 Austrian Jewish refugees, who had emigrated from Nazi Germany, including Austria, up to 1939.

The things that you find on the internet. I recently found on You Tube a television movie from 1976, Collision Course, which deals with the conflict between Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman over Korean War policy. I had seen the movie when it was first broadcast, and was delighted to watch it again. Go here to watch the entire movie. The late Henry Fonda stars as MacArthur and the late E.G. Marshall portrays Truman. The Truman MacArthur conflict is often seen as a vindication of the right of the President to call the shots when it comes to foreign policy and waging war, but the conflict was actually caused by an abdication of presidential responsibility. Truman viewed Korea as a potentially dangerous annoyance, and he wanted this “police action” wrapped up as soon as possible. No planning was made about what to do if the Chinese intervened. A sensible policy would have been to order MacArthur to form a defensive line north of Pyongyang and across to Wonsan. The Korean peninsula narrows to a hundred miles at this point and would have been quite defensible with American firepower in the event of Chinese intervention. Instead MacArthur, who was convinced that the Chinese would not intervene, was left free to conduct a helter-skelter advance to the Yalu, secure in his misguided belief that the Chinese would not intervene, and that if they did, he could easily defeat them. MacArthur was guilty of military malpractice and Truman was guilty of presidential nonfeasance.

On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.

Eighty-five years too late, a movie on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in the Soviet Union is being released tomorrow. Some six million people were murdered by starvation in Stalin’s man made famine, and almost all of these people died in the most agriculturally fertile areas of the Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine. This was Stalin’s way of imposing collectivization on the recalcitrant farmers of his empire, while eliminating the opposition to Communist rule in the countryside. For Stalin the mass deaths were a feature not a bug. While all this was going on most Western journalists in the Soviet Union actively attempted to conceal the existence of the famine. Only a few brave journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge, then a partisan of the left, had the courage to speak out and tell honestly what they had seen with their own eyes. Walter Duranty, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reports from the Soviet Union, of the New York Times denounced journalists who reported on the famine. “Fake news” has a long pedigree on the left in this country.

Fate dealt President Zachary Taylor only one annual message to Congress. It is a fascinating look at the world and of America at mid-stream in the 19th century:

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives:

Sixty years have elapsed since the establishment of this Government, and the Congress of the United States again assembles to legislate for an empire of freemen. The predictions of evil prophets, who formerly pretended to foretell the downfall of our institutions, are now remembered only to be derided, and the United States of America at this moment present to the world the most stable and permanent Government on earth.

Such is the result of the labors of those who have gone before us. Upon Congress will eminently depend the future maintenance of our system of free government and the transmission of it unimpaired to posterity.

We are at peace with all the other nations of the world, and seek to maintain our cherished relations of amity with them. During the past year we have been blessed by a kind Providence with an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and although the destroying angel for a time visited extensive portions of our territory with the ravages of a dreadful pestilence, yet the Almighty has at length deigned to stay his hand and to restore the inestimable blessing of general health to a people who have acknowledged His power, deprecated His wrath, and implored His merciful protection.(more…)

I find it comforting that conspiracy theorists have always been with us, and that they are not only a feature of our times. On July 4, 1850 Taylor had a busy day attending several Independence Day celebrations and a fund raising event for the Washington Monument. The day was hot and Taylor drank a lot of ice milk and ate a great deal of raw fruit. Unsurprisingly he came down with a gastric ailment thereafter. Physicians treated him with the best medicine of the time, which often weakened or finished off the poor patients subject to it: Taylor was dosed with ipecac, calomel, opium, and quinine at 40 grains per dose (approximately 2.6 grams), and bled and blistered. Several of Taylor’s cabinet members came down with similar symptoms. The 65 year old Taylor died on July 9, 1850.

In hindsight an analysis of Taylor’s death is pretty straightforward. The White House had a tainted water supply with raw sewage running into it. This probably killed three presidents: Harrison, Polk (who died shortly after his term in office) and Taylor. Cholera was the big killer in 19th century urban centers until sewers were installed, and Taylor likely died of some variant of that bacterial infection.

Taylor had opposed what became known as the Compromise of 1850, wanting to keep slavery out of the territories won from Mexico. Some abolitionists claimed, without any evidence, that pro-slavery advocates had poisoned the president. Although rumors abounded, no official investigation ever took place. (more…)

Jefferson Davis was the son-in-law of Zachary Taylor. Marrying the daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, of General Zachary Taylor, who opposed the marriage, he resigned his commission in the Army in 1835. Tragically the new bride died three months after her marriage of malaria. She was 21. Taylor blamed Davis for bringing his daughter to the malarial infested region in which his plantation was located in Mississippi. War would end the enmity of the two men who loved Sarah Knox Taylor.

Although he had resigned from the Army, however, Davis never ceased to be a military man, always retaining a fascination for all things martial. Thus it was only natural that Davis, a Congressman from Mississippi at the beginning of the Mexican War, resigned from Congress and raised a volunteer regiment, the Mississippi Rifles, which he led as colonel.

On July 21, 1846, the regiment sailed from New Orleans to join the army of Zachary Taylor in northern Mexico.

Davis had armed his regiment with 1841 percussion rifles, the latest technology, with much more reliable percussion caps substituted for flint locks. Davis’ men during the war would use the rifles with such deadly skill that ever afterwords the rifles became known as 1841 Mississippi percussion rifles.

Davis and his men participated in the siege of Monterrey in September of 1846. The war in northern Mexico then entered a quiet phrase which was shattered in February of 1847 by a Mexican offensive.

Yesterday I ran a post containing Abraham Lincoln’s eulogy on Zachary Taylor. Go here to read it. It is an interesting eulogy and deserves some comment. It should be noted that Lincoln was disappointed that the Taylor administration did not offer him a post that he had been seeking. As one of the leaders of the Whig party in Illinois, he felt that this was a slight not only to him but to Illinois Whigs. Outwardly he remained supportive of the Taylor administration, but privately he regarded Taylor as a weak leader and an immense disappointment. Thus his eulogy was delivered more out of duty than out of any fondness for a man who turned out to be the last Whig elected president. On to the eulogy. (more…)

I have never liked Presidents’ Day. Why celebrate all presidents when only a select few of them, like Washington and Lincoln, deserve to be celebrated? Officially the date is still the commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, which actually won’t occur until February 22. However, I will keep up my tradition of writing about presidents on this day.

American presidents all fit into two broad categories: those who had political careers and held political offices prior to their presidency and those who did not. Only five presidents held no political office prior to being elected President: Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Donald Trump. Zachary Taylor, the first non-politician to become president, is now an obscure figure to most Americans, his fame in the Mexican War almost entirely forgotten by the oblivion that has largely swallowed that conflict, and his relatively brief time in office ensuring that his administration would be one of the forgotten ones in popular memory. Ironically, one of our two most famous Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, deliver a eulogy on the death of Taylor. Tomorrow I will comment on the obituary. Today, I want us to focus on Lincoln’s words, as we use the eulogy as a springboard to look at “Old Rough and Ready” throughout this week. Here is Lincoln’s eulogy:

EULOGY PRONOUNCEDBY HON. A. LINCOLN,ON THE LIFE AND SERVICES OF THE LATE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,At Chicago, July 25th, 1850

GENERAL ZACHARY TAYLOR, the eleventh elected President of the United States, is dead. He was born Nov. 2nd, [2] 1784, in Orange county, Virginia; and died July the 9th 1850, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the White House in Washington City. He was the second [3] son of Richard Taylor, a Colonel in the army of the Revolution. His youth was passed among the pioneers of Kentucky, whither his parents emigrated soon after his birth; and where his taste for military life, probably inherited, was greatly stimulated. Near the commencement of our last war with Great Britain, he was appointed by President Jefferson, a lieutenant in the 7th regiment of Infantry. During the war, he served under Gen. Harrison in his North Western campaign against the Indians; and, having been promoted to a captaincy, was intrusted with the defence of Fort Harrison, with fifty men, half of them unfit for duty. A strong party of Indians, under the Prophet, brother of Tecumseh, made a midnight attack on the Fort; but Taylor, though weak in his force, and without preparation, was resolute, and on the alert; and, after a battle, which lasted till after daylight, completely repulsed them. Soon after, he took a prominent part in the expedition under Major Gen. Hopkins against the Prophet’s town; and, on his return, found a letter from President Madison, who had succeeded Mr. Jefferson, conferring on him a major’s brevet for his gallant defence of Fort Harrison.(more…)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), perhaps the greatest of Westerns, contains this gem of a scene with John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Jimmy Stewart, Strother Marvin, Lee Van Cleef and Woody Strode. Marvin as Liberty Valance is the archetypal mercenary gunslinger, his days, and the days of his kind, about to come to an end. Wayne as Tom Doniphon, rancher, is the obverse of Marvin, a man just as tough as Valance, if not tougher, but no bully. However, his time is also closing. Their destroyer? The almost clown like figure of Ransom Stoddard, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart. He knows nothing about guns, but he knows a lot about law, and law and civilization are fast coming to the range. This is John Ford’s eulogy to the Old West, and to this type of Western. (more…)